The Dissolving Thoughts of a Drowning Madwoman
by Queen of Dreaming
Summary: The murky water swirls around her, floating her skirt up around her waist, muddy streams tugging at the hems and laces like pretty princely fingers. Ophelia's thoughts as she drowns.


**Warning: talk of sex and strongly implied abortion. Written for the book_las competition on LiveJournal, where it won the round.**

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Ophelia supposes she ought to try to swim. They'd want her to.

No, wait, that isn't right. _Silly silly Ophelia, don't you remember? It's why you're out here with the flowers, there's nobody left any more to want you to reach for the shore._ So that doesn't answer the question at all, whether to swim for the willows or not.

The murky river water swirls around her, floating her skirt up around her waist, muddy streams tugging at the hems and laces like pretty princely fingers. Those fingers she remembers, fine and pale and elegant and ink-stained and soaked in blood, berry-bright. She never would have expected it – wait, yes, she would, she would, she'd seen them so sweet against her skin, his clever gentle fingers splayed on her stomach and the sheets with a trickle of blood across her hands. But that was different, a different kind of red and planned beforehand. She'd stayed up night after night and decided it was all right that he got the blood of her maidenhood. She's singing that, she realizes, letting the rhymes weave into the babble of the stream lapping at her breasts. She was thinking about something – what was it?

Bloody lovely fingers, those were on her mind. All the wrong kinds of blood, old man's life. That ought to be a flower, lady's-slipper and heart's-ease and old man's life, royal purple offset by jet and pale blushes on delicate curves and then her flower, her father's flower, rich rich red just right for a passionate girl's pretty hair. Pity passionate girls with pretty hair, she thinks as the river soaks hers into vague swirls on the brown water.

Oh, right, the river. The river and the shore, and she has to choose between the two. So hard. Oughtn't you to be between two things if you're going to choose for one and against the other? But she isn't, she's deep in the water, and that will make it so much harder if she does decide to swim. She still isn't sure.

Her skirts are growing heavy, heavy and dark, just like they grew after she took the bitter potion. The secret potion, not from the palace doctor but from one of the town's witch-women, the potion that made her sick for days and tasted like dirt and the armory air no matter how much mint she put in it. The potion for girls who pretend to be virgins, for girls who want to win wolf-eyed princes with scholarly hands and yet must keep themselves sweet and clean as they can't be future queens.

The water bubbles at her mouth, far sweeter than the potion was, and she realizes she's sinking. Better think fast. She can't make it to shore in these seemingly bloody skirts, but the river's tugging on the fastenings and she could slip them off, slide onto the sand in nothing but skin and sky and the sun's bright eye. She wouldn't be decent, but she'd be alive. Which is better, which is worse? Better not announce she's a royal whore. Her father wouldn't want her to, of that much she is sure.

Hamlet would probably want her to live, she thinks, as hard as the poet prince is to read. But she's been naked for him once before, and it came out so beautifully for her. She doesn't know what Laertes would want her to do, but she's not the pretty little innocent sister he used to know, so that doesn't matter.

She wonders, vaguely, what _she_ wants. Oh, wait, no, that's wrong. Dutiful girls listen to their fathers and tuck their whims up tight at night. But she isn't dutiful and beautiful anymore, so perhaps it's all right.

She doesn't know what she wants. She isn't used to choosing to want, isn't used to choosing on her own, but there's nobody else in the water with her, nobody but the willows. Maybe she can ask them. Yes, that's what she wants, to ask the willows what she wants.

She opens her mouth to see if they know, but the bright murky river keeps her quiet, and she doesn't get a chance to find out. Her hands feel distant and far away, the brown water is distorting their shape, and she doesn't know what to do or even, anymore, how to move.

She thinks, dim and distant, that she still doesn't know what she would have chosen but she'd have liked to scream once before she died.


End file.
